The seester has come and gone

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  Taichung, Taiwan
Tuesday, September 4, 2007

The last couple of days have been a bit hard for your friend Polina. My wonderfully magnetic, beautiful and adventurous sister arrived in Taiwan 2 weeks ago, and on Sunday I escorted her into a taxi to go back to America, thus the last 2 days without her rivaled the experience of someone with a missing, phantom limb. The twelve days that Liza spent here were so rich in all aspects that it seems at the moment that the void is impossible to fit. Every second I wasn't at work, Liza and I were chilling, and traveling, and riding around on my scooter, talking, drinking, fighting, complaining, exulting, and eating. When she first arrived, the first couple of days we spent in Taichung, passing the time with Liza between Andrew and myself. Thankfully, he and I are on completely different schedules, so this left few times when Liza was by herself in out big, bad city. But on the fourth day, Liza and I booked a trip to Hualien, the amazingly stunning east coast of Taiwan. I was to arrive exactly 24 hours after Liza arrived there. None of us predicted or acted on Liza's primary source of trouble in Taiwan, FOOD. So she got to Hualien, and could not find anything to eat. I totally forgot about the fact that on my second day in Taiwan, the girl whose job I had taken over in Gram took me to the Seven Eleven next door to the school and showed me every vegetarian object that she was eating there. She onigiri, the salads, the noodles and the ramen soups. I took for granted these things of course, and when Liza was in Taichung with me the first couple of days, I just automatically bought food that suited us both without explaining anything. So through no fault of her own, (but all the fault of Polina Zvyagina) Liza finds herself in a city even less able to accommodate a non-Chinese speaker, with no food in her stomach, no ability to communicate that she doesn't eat meat, and totally hating this terrible Taiwan, with its putrid air, its stinky tofu and its lack of any aestheticism within city borders.
        This is something I guess I failed to ever mention. Because I was constantly entertained by the neon lights and the Chinese character on every sign, I guess I failed to notice that that was the only good-looking thing about the cities. They all look so much better at night, when the general soot left on the building from the sedimentary pollution vanishes into the darkness of the night. All Taiwanese cities, for the most part, look the same, and that is to say, pretty ugly, with no attention paid to the general environment that the city nests itself in. So....Hualien county, being the most naturally beautiful place in Taiwan, greets Liza with Hualien City, a typically classless, night-market oriented, no-sidewalk, every building the same dreary color, super humid town.
        I never thought that I would stop noticing things about Taiwan that are so different from home. I never thought I would start the things that used to shock me and that I would write about in these blogs, for granted, but here I was, doing just that. Obviously, I didn't prepare Liza for everything that she was going to experience here. I did say things like "it's really really different" and "you'll think it's quite dirty" and "the pollution is really bad" and "there is not a lot of vegetarian food" but I guess when you're sitting on the 17th floor of your sweet Jersey City apartment looking at the Manhattan skyline, Liza though "Hey, how bad could it be?"  She was in for a big surprise.
        But after the experience of the first day alone wore off, and I arrived in the plane to greet Liza on her top bunk of our hostel, I found her calm and excited at the same time, finally at peace with the reality of the super hectic/totally non-pretentious/extremely hospitable place that Taiwan really is. We spent the next two nights wandering the streets of the town looking for hidden treasures, and spent full days exploring the utterly exposed natural beauty of the surrounding areas. Within the radius of 10 miles, we encountered gargantuan, imposing mountains, marble gorges, cascading rivers, bursting waterfalls, mountain temples, and dangerous walkways. We arrived in Hualien exactly one week after Typhoon Sepat hit, and there were still massive rock slides and evidence of property destroyed due to this pacific storm. Entire trails and bridges were closed down because they were destroyed by giant boulders flying down from the tops of cliffs. We also went to the beaches, whose waves we did not anticipate to be so large. Perhaps it was an oncoming storm or just a coincidence testing our dare-devilishness, but the waves did not die down the whole time Liza and I were on the beach for 2 days. The first day we contrived ways of playing in the water without submerging our bodies at all. We used bottles and her Jamaican hat to soak ourselves in our glorified sponge bath. The second day we actually went in and swam and body surfed on Jici beach, despite the churning black sand in the water, and the oncoming traffic of surfers ready to run us over if we had gotten in their way.
I guess the most memorable of all experiences there was the night that we invested in our ponchos. We ducked under cover of some rooftops just as a tropical storm began. After sitting under the roof for at least 30 minutes we finally understood that the rain was only becoming heavier and had no chance of subsiding, so we bought some ponchos, which they sell here for under a dollar and ventured out into the torrential downpour. As soon as we departed out roof covering, we heard the beat of some loud music; we followed out ears and arrived at a dance performance in a giant parking lot. The first part of the performance was dance battles, followed by a hip hop show. Liza and I were 2 of maybe 10 people in the whole place; I'm assuming this was due to the weather, which decreased visibility to maybe 10 meters. Anyway, what we thought was going to be a 40 minute dance show, turned into a traditional clothing fashion show, which later molded to a solo performance by this wicked Taiwanese singer, which was immediately followed by a real fashion show by the Vera Wang of Taiwan. We witnessed nearly 40 models parade the most gorgeous ballroom and wedding gowns as strutted down the soaking podium in their five inch heels. Each girl was accompanied by stunning men, and she herself looked better than any doll or magazine model I had ever seen. For the grand finale, the rain increase tenfold, and even though it took exactly 2 seconds to get fully wet under the rain, every model, in her amazing white wedding gown came out down the exposed podium and posed for what will probably be the most amazing pictures, with the rain and all. So for two hours, Liza and I in our ponchos witness that Taiwan was all about, no pretense, not backing out, no natural disasters will stop any event, no matter how glamorous and how scant the public. Needless to say, we loved Hualien.
The next couple of days back in Taichung Liza and Andrew went to amazing places around here, Sun Moon Lake, DaKeng Mountains, the Botanical Gardens and the Science Museum. Once Liza was forced to spend a solitary afternoon in the Art Museum too, so that sucked but otherwise, we had such an amazing holiday when my seester was here. It's so hard to describe, but it's like sharing your experiences with another part of yourself, but more fun than just yourself. It was amazing times. And Liza if you disagree or feel like modifying anything I wrote please please comment here.
Love you all
Polina

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